And so for all Solnit’s insistence on the liberatory possibilities of women’s stories, there is always this undercurrent, the evidence that the change is not quite so clear-cut as we think. In “Men Explain Lolita to Me”, Solnit records some of the “batshit” (her word) thrown her way when she dared to suggest that there was more than one way to read Lolita. In “Cassandra Among the Creeps”, Solnit chronicles the allegations of both Anita Hill and Dylan Farrow, then admits that these women “don’t always prevail in our time”. It’s impossible, for instance, to read the piece about Rodger (“One Year After Seven Deaths”) without thinking about how few people seemed to be convinced that his rampage was the result of misogyny. And as someone who, like Solnit, wants to see change, I often feel the stagnation also needs to be addressed. But there is a point where it starts to feel that women have been speaking and telling certain stories – if not all the stories – and though some change has come, there has also been some stagnation. Perhaps it’s my immersion in a feminist history that stretches back – as Solnit traces it here – to Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own. Perhaps that’s me, perhaps it’s my years of immersion in the online feminist renaissance that people have been declaring a world-changing revolution since at least 2008, though the US is still incapable of, for example, electing a woman to the presidency. Sexual violence, in particular, is a thing women are silent about, and it flourishes, Solnit believes, in the space of that silence.Īs I read this essay – and the others in this collection, which, though they touch on everything from Lolita to rape jokes to the 2014 massacre perpetrated by Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara, are thematically similar – I felt myself both carried along by Solnit’s elegant polemical rhetoric and more than a little unsatisfied, at prose’s end, by the simple solutions her analysis implied and endorsed. “The history of silence is central to women’s history,” she claims in “A Short History of Silence”. Solnit is unabashedly in favour of ending all our silences, which she sees as disproportionately female. Solnit could not have planned it this way but the longest and only previously unpublished essay in this well-timed book happens to be concerned with the notion of silencing. Instead, they shut you up in a room with your own uncomfortable memories, the things you’ve kept silent about. Stories such as these don’t feel like victories. Opinion writers tended to declare the moment a triumph, calling #MeToo a movement that would finally give voice to the voiceless, but if there was a prize to be won from all this, it is still difficult for a lot of women I know to see. The allegations against Harvey Weinstein had hit the news cycle, and scanning it had become a hot and stuffy experience. S erendipity might well exist, for I opened Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays subtitled “further feminisms” at a moment that demanded what you could call “further feminist” thought.
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